


The Way I Wear Your Hat

by Muccamukk



Category: Band of Brothers
Genre: 5 Times, Canon Era, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Feelings, Hugs, M/M, Non-Sexual Intimacy, Sexually charged non-sexual intimacy?, Sharing Clothes, if by "sharing" you mean "stealing"
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-04
Updated: 2019-07-04
Packaged: 2020-06-03 18:10:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,354
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19469365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Muccamukk/pseuds/Muccamukk
Summary: Lew keeps stealing Dick's clothes. Dick keeps noticing.





	The Way I Wear Your Hat

**Author's Note:**

> Title paraphrased from Gershwin.
> 
> For a friend, who wanted sweater theft, and got this.

**April 1942**  
They're getting out of the showers at the end of one of those endless days of crawling through the mud in the name of education or building character or some other bullshit, when Lew notices that Corporal Winters' uniform is folded next to his own.

Boarding school made Nix a master of folding clothes just so, but he can't compete with the perfect creases of Winters' uniform, if he tried. Not that he especially has been trying. Two weeks in, and Lew's been coasting through OCS on the merits of a quick mind, charm, and twenty odd years of experience in making himself come off as the person someone else expects him to be. Winters has been working like a dog, and looking damn good doing it.

Lew finishes dressing, ignoring the bustle of naked young men around him. His eyes fall back to that impeccably folded uniform. On an impulse he doesn't quite understand, Lew takes the barracks cap out of his belt, and swaps it for Winters'. There's no difference between the two—they're all in army-issue olive drab down to their skivvies—but it pleases Lew to have something of Winters'.

It smells like the brand of pomade he uses, sweat and army laundry soap. Lew picks off a stray red hair and puts the cap on. It fits exactly the same as Lew's own does. It feels different.

Lew saunters out into the quad whistling, enjoying the few free minutes before some stuffed shirt of an NCO starts yelling at him again. He's slow enough that by the time he gets to the mess, Winters has just about caught up with him.

Lew looks him up and down, taking in Winters' lean hips and broad shoulders. He'd be a soldier's soldier if there wasn't that flicker of gawkiness that kept showing through, almost like he has a sense of humour. Lew will never be a soldier's anything, but he's fundamentally all right with that. Though a small part of him wouldn't mind being something if the soldier in question was Corporal Winters.

Winters catches Lew looking and their eyes meet. Lew should glance away, but he holds his ground, daring Winters to make something of it. Winters does He looks Lew up and down like he's Hedy Lamarr in her underwear, before flicking his gaze up to Lew's cover and raising an eyebrow. His cheeks are faintly pink.

Lew twitches his shoulder up in a suggestion of a shrug, caught out but unrepentant.

Winters smiles.

**January 1943**  
"I'm stealing your socks," Lew announces. He rolls over top of Dick, reaching for his ruck in the corner of the tent. Underneath Lew, Dick's whole body rises and falls sharply as he huffs in feigned annoyance. At least, Lew's pretty sure it's feigned.

"Lewis..." Dick says, and okay maybe he's actually annoyed. Lew waits for the other half of that sentence, but Dick expects him to know what the problem is.

Lew has a couple of theories, but pretends ignorance. He's lying with his chest across Dick's, half supported by his knees and one elbow, but nothing separating them save for Dick's sleeping bag and the four layers of clothing they're both wearing against the god awful cold. It feels like nothing at all is separating them. Dick's breath puffs in Lew's ear, the warmest thing he's felt in days.

Since Lew's dropped the thread, Dick says, "You didn't bring extra, huh?"

Lew shrugs, the movement rising and dropping his body over Dick's in a movement that's far more suggestive than he intends. "I did," he says, and keeps pawing through Dick's ruck. "They're at the bottom of my bag. You keep yours on top."

Dick chuckles and bumps his forehead against Lew's ear, his lips brushing Lew's neck. Unintentionally? Lew honestly can't tell. He thought on that first exchange of looks that things would proceed directly forward, but instead they've spent nine months in a dance of uncertainty. And if Dick feels the same as Lew does, he's not willing to risk the first move either. The only sign of caution Lew's ever seen from him.

What if Lew's wrong?

So he keeps stealing Dick's clothes. Not because his cover or his tie or his socks aren't to hand, but because he thinks maybe this is the closest he'll get to intimacy. And because maybe, someday, it'll nerve one or other of them up to actually admitting what they want.

Dick shoves Lew off of him just as he lays hands on the socks, and Lew rolls half out of the tent, blasting them both with frigid rain. Lew swears a blue streak, but Dick just laughs at him.

The socks keep Lew's feet warm for the rest of the march.

**June 1944**  
Like so many things, the little dance they've been doing comes to a head in the first week of June. Unsettled by the postponement, Lew hovers around Dick's billet sipping from his flask and wondering how the hell he's going to nerve himself up for this all over again. The first time was bad enough.

Dick mostly ignores him, caught in his own version of nerving up. At one point he pulls his gloves off and throws himself into his camp chair, taking up a pen to write, then setting it down again. It's some comfort to Lew that even Dick Winters doesn't know how to convey what he's feeling to someone back home just then.

When Dick gets up to pace the three steps to the wall and back, he leaves his gloves on the desk. Lew only hesitates for a moment before he trades them for his own—which he wasn't wearing and doesn't plan to wear until he's in that C-47 lifting off for _Fortress Europa_.

When he pulls Dick's gloves on, they still carry the heat of his body. Lew shivers, somehow feeling colder despite having warmer hands.

"You okay?" Dick asks, and Lew just shakes his head. _Peachy_ , he should say, or _never better_ , or _of course_ , but he can't.

Instead, Lew raises his hands, wiggles his fingers, and says, "I will be now."

Dick's mouth quirks up like Lew expected, but then his eyes narrow. He's thinking too hard about this, and all that attention focused entirely on Lew like it hasn't been—not really—since that day at OCS when Lew started this game.

Lew's breath catches and he'd swear to battalion's surgeon that his heart just stopped.

"Why do you do that?" Dick asks.

"Do what?"

"Steal my clothes. First I thought it was an army buddy thing, but Harry doesn't, and you aren't always wearing Harry's socks." He's standing motionless, weight more on one leg than the other, head cocked slightly, studying Lew's face.

"Oh," Lew hesitates. The weight of the hour hovers over them, making all words seem to hold the ring of fate—something that can't possibly be altered once spoken. It goes for lies as well as truth. If Lew wants to make the whole thing a joke, he can. He curls his gloved hands up and holds his fists right over his heart. "Guess it's my way of keeping you around," he says and looks Dick right in the eye.

Dick nods slightly, like he's confirming a detail in a long-arranged plan of attack, but his lips are parted slightly, and he looks far from sure. When he steps forward, Lew half expects to be kissed. It's certainly what he's hoped every time for two years now.

Instead of touching Lew, Dick reaches into the pocket of his jacket and pulls out a handkerchief. It's just olive drab cotton, clean and perfectly folded like everything Dick owns. Dick holds it out, smiling a little, but when Lew reaches down to take it, Dick's hand is shaking.

"I can't, Nix," Dick tells him. "Not tonight." Lew knows what he means. Not _won't_ , _can't_ : _cannot_ , _is physically unable to._. 

"Tomorrow doesn't look too great either," Lew says, and he wants to take a drink to keep his own hands from shaking. His gloved fingers close over Dick's bare ones, and the handkerchief is a promise between them.

"Yeah, we'll see," Dick says, and Lew figures they will.

**February 1945**  
Dick doesn't shower until after they've got new uniforms. He says he doesn't see any point getting clean and then putting on something with enough mud and blood engrained in it for it stand up on its own. Lew can see his point of view—though it didn't stop Dick's fastidiousness in the middle of the Ardennes winter—and holds off with him.

They leave their old uniforms in piles by the door. The water is tepid at best, and the showers open to view on two sides. Not that Lew's got a scrap of modesty left after three years in the army, but he still wishes for the privacy to touch. He still watches sideways as Dick scrubs the dirt off his body and tries to get the soap to suds in his hair. He still remembers that bathtub in Paris—the last time they were truly alone and free to be with each other.

SHAEF is planning a spring offensive, and it's almost March now. As Lew watches Dick bending to run the soap over his long legs—already bony before they'd spent two months on the line with only short rations—he wonders how many more campaigns any of them have left in them.

Lew wonders if the army expects them to just wash the blood off, change into fresh clothes, and be ready to fight again. Like nothing's happened. Like the Germans haven't just slaughtered or maimed half their men in front of them.

Dick straightens, and Lew watches his shoulders go back and his spine pull taut, like he's been suspended from the ceiling: a perfect army doll even naked in the showers.

He strides out; Lew slouches after him.

When they get back to the piles of clothes, Dick starts to put on his fresh uniform. Lew follows suit, and he has to admit that the feel of clean cotton against clean skin is transcendent. He pulls on the heavy wool shirt and jacket and is actually warm.

Dick finished dressing first and is staring down at his old uniform like he doesn't know what to do with it. He fingers the frayed Screaming Eagle patch for a moment, then turns away. 

Lew doesn't. Instead of leaving it to be thrown away, or burned, or scavenged by any civilians unfortunate enough to still live in this shithole, he paws through until he finds Dick's old scarf. It's threadbare in places, pilled in the rest, and is half made of shaving soap by now, but it kept Dick warm these past months.

It smells like armpit when Lew loops it around his neck, jamming the new one in his jacket pocket.

Dick glances at Lew when he catches up, and for a moment his face tightens as though he's clenching his jaw to hold back tears. He dips his head, and Lew leans over just enough to bump shoulders.

"I'm glad you're here, Nix," Dick says, voice thick.

"Yeah," Lew agrees, though he doesn't want either of them to be there. "Me too."

**January 1946**  
Lew's wearing a wool undershirt, flannel pyjama tops and a cardigan, but the chill of winter still creeps in. The house in New Jersey is old, and no amount of shutters or bolsters can keep the draughts out on windy nights. Dick spends the evenings huddled under three sweaters and still has the pinched look of memories, and Lew knows he probably looks about the same. A year ago, they were...

It's not that he's drinking, much. Lew's been trying to cut back on the booze since Dick moved in, but he still hasn't hammered his sleep around to go to bed same time as Dick. Instead, he sits up to twelve or one listening to the radio turned down low and reading or, like tonight, pacing the house to check the windows.

Some part of him that he'll never admit to Dick likes being the man of the house and looking after his fellow, checking that he's safe and secure. Maybe Dick feels the same, the way he badgers Lew into eating three meals a day and making sure there's a roast on Sunday—hushed phone calls to his mother for instructions and all.

Lew snags a sweater from the back of the rocking chair and holds it for a moment before realising it's that lumpy grey thing Dick's sister knitted Dick for Christmas. Lew holds it up to his nose, inhaling the scent of Dick's aftershave and hair. It's only been two weeks, but already the house smells half like him now.

The sweater's too long in the sleeves even for Dick's taller frame, but that's okay. It keeps Lew's hands warm. He pulls it tight around him and hunches his shoulders to keep his neck warm. Dick insisted they burn the scarf, but Lew still keeps the handkerchief.

He turns back into the house, one more round before bed.

They almost collide when Dick comes out of the bathroom just as Lew's heading to the backstairs to see if he can get that upper window to stop rattling. Lew's hands go up to Dick's shoulders to steady himself, Dick's hands land on Lew's hips—not steadying, but a reciprocation of the touch, fitting their bodies together out of habit.

They stand like that for a moment in the darkened hallway until Dick fingers the hem of the sweater, and asks, "Still wearing my clothes, huh?"

"Always," Lew says and smiles. Dick will hear it in his voice even if he can't see. They know each other by heart now.

Only there's no answering laughter in Dick's voice when he replies. "That a promise?"

"Of course," Lew tells him, and anything else he might say is smothered when Dick pulls him into his arms and hugs the wind out of him. That's okay too.


End file.
